COLLECTION D r. Bob Reely, professor of management and associate executive director of the American Studies Institute, had a lifelong hobby: model airplanes. Even as a young child, he pieced together World War 11 planes and hoped that one day he might be in the cockpit. "The first thing I wanted to be in life was a pilot," Reely said. "I applied to be an aeronautical engineer at Caltech when I was 8 years old, but they didn't admit me for some reason." It was not long before Reely fulfilled his dream of becoming a pilot. Immediately after graduating from Florida State University in 19601 he entered pilot training at Craig Air Force Base in Alabama. According to Reely, he did well in training and became an instructor pilot. Soon, he was even what he called an "instructor pilot of instructor pilots." Reely did not restrict his model-building to childhood. Building models only became more meaningful to him as he joined the Air Force and later moved on to work at Harding. "I build a lot of models," Reely said. "It's frankly kind of therapy. I can go home and invest ... a great deal of attention to detail in building a model." Attention to detail was particularly valuable for Reely. As associate executive director of ASI, he oversaw a number of programs year-round such as Special Olympics Arkansas and Arkansas Girls State, the largest Girls State program in the country. The most public function of ASI was the American Studies Lecture Series, which brought four to six keynote speakers to campus every year. Handling all of these programs required the same precision that Reely practiced with his model airplanes. As a child, Reely made model airplanes in anticipation of being a pilot. As an adult, he made them as a reminder of his time in the Air Force. Reely learned some valuable principles as a pilot- particularly while he spent a year of active duty in Vietnam - many of which he carried with him into his career as a professor and associate executive director of ASI. "Dr. Reely has taken the American Studies program and developed it into a really world-class program," Senior Vice President Jim Carr said. "His experience in training and his personal discipline that he certainly got from the military are both assets to his work at Harding." Former Harding President Dr. George Benson served as an inspiration to Reely, who borrowed Benson's three C's to describe his own values: capitalism, constitutional government and Christian values. "I just appreciate Christian values permeating the leadership and management styles of legends like Sam Walton," Reely said. "We are tending within our country [and] within our government to drift away from that." Values from the Air Force exhibited themselves in Reely's classroom as well. According to his daughter-in-law, Instructor of Nursing Rhonda Reely, his students appreciated his practical teaching based on real experience. Reely appreciated working with an organization that he called "very congruent" to his own value system. He hoped that his contributions would have a lasting impact. " My future involves passing along my experience to the next generation, so th.at American Studies continues to be ... part of the fabric of Harding University," Reely said. JP Baker
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